Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents (2013)
16 hours ago
- #Document Security
- #Technical Vulnerability
- #Xerox Scanner Bug
- Xerox scanners/photocopiers have a bug that randomly alters numbers in scanned documents, which is not an OCR issue but a pixel data substitution problem.
- The bug, present for eight years, affects hundreds of thousands of devices in the WorkCentre and ColorQube families, potentially causing dangerous errors like incorrect invoices or construction plans.
- Discovery occurred in July 2013, and despite early reporting to Xerox, public disclosure followed in August 2013 after insufficient response, leading to widespread media coverage and eventual patch releases.
- Affected devices include various WorkCentre and ColorQube models, with errors reproducible under different compression settings, including the recommended 'higher' quality level.
- The issue stems from faulty pattern matching in JBIG2 compression, where similar image segments are incorrectly substituted, reducing the legal validity of scanned documents due to potential data loss.